Brazil is a country of extreme inequalities, one of the most important of which is the acute concentration of rural land ownership. In recent decades, however, poor landless workers have mounted a major challenge to this state of affairs. A broad grassroots social movement led by the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) has mobilized hundreds of thousands of families to pressure authorities for land reform through mass protest. This book explores the evolution of the landless movement from its birth during the twilight years of Brazil&’s military dictatorship through the first government of Luiz In&ácio Lula da Silva. It uses this case to test a number of major theoretical perspectives on social movements and engages in a critical dialogue with both contemporary political opportunity theory and Mancur Olson&’s classic economic theory of collective action. Ondetti seeks to explain the major moments of change in the landless movement's growth trajectory: its initial emergence in the late 1970s and early 80s, its rapid takeoff in the mid-1990s, its acute but ultimately temporary crisis in the early 2000s, and its resurgence during Lula's first term in office. He finds strong support for the influential, but much-criticized political opportunity perspective. At the same time, however, he underscores some of the problems with how political opportunity has been conceptualized in the past. The book also seeks to shed light on the anomalous fact that the landless movement continued to expand in the decade following the restoration of Brazilian democracy in 1985 despite the general trend toward social-movement decline. His argument, which highlights the unusual structure of incentives involved in the struggle for land in Brazil, casts doubt on a key assumption underlying Olson's theory.

This groundbreaking work is the first volume in English to examine Brazil's historic policy reforms of the 1990s and the political, economic, and social results. For years the large and ineffective government of Brazil could neither improve the country's greatly uneven distribution of wealth nor maintain inflation at reasonable levels. In the 1990s, long overdue changes bettered the government's fiscal performance, tamed inflation, and addressed chronic social ills stemming from the imbalance of wealth. But many problems, and many questions, remain. Why is Brazil still so poor, and why is inequality so intransigent? Were some of the reforms counterproductive, or could they have been implemented in a more effective way? Collecting essays by top Brazilianist scholars from various disciplines and intellectual traditions, Reforming Brazil provides new insights for international policy makers, economists, and scholars of Brazil.

This book re-examines the relationship between development strategy and political regime in twentieth-century Brazil. The first part of the study examines the beginning in the 1920s and 1930s of the centralized regime and state-centered development model later challenged in the 1980s, taking into account the economic and political role of Sao Paulo relative to the federal government. The analysis provides a distinctive account of the regime ruling Brazil from the 1930s through the 1980s. The second part focuses on the process of economic and political change in the 1980s and 1990s, paying particular attention to the Cardoso administration.

In Democracy without Equity, Weyland investigates the crucial political issue for many Latin American countries: the possibility for redistributing wealth and power through the democratic process. He focuses on Brazil's redistributive initiatives in tax policy, social security, and health care. Weyland's work is based on some 260 interviews with interest group representatives, politicians, and bureaucrats, the publications of interest groups, speeches of policy makers, newspaper accounts, legislative bills, congressional committee reports, and more. He concludes that, in countries whose society and political parties are fragmented, the prospects for effective redistributive policies are poor.

It has been more than 20 years since Brazil's 1988 Constitution formally established the Unified Health System (Sistema Unico de Saude, SUS). Building on reforms that started in the 1980s, the SUS represented a significant break with the past, establishing health care as a fundamental right and duty of the state and initiating a process of fundamentally transforming Brazil's health system to achieve this goal. This report aims to answer two main questions. First is have the SUS reforms transformed the health system as envisaged 20 years ago? Second, have the reforms led to improvements with regard to access to services, financial protection, and health outcomes? In addressing these questions, the report revisits ground covered in previous assessments, but also brings to bear additional or more recent data and places Brazil's health system in an international context. The report shows that the health system reforms can be credited with significant achievements. The report points to some promising directions for health system reforms that will allow Brazil to continue building on the achievements made to date. Although it is possible to reach some broad conclusions, there are many gaps and caveats in the story. A secondary aim of the report is to consider how some of these gaps can be filled through improved monitoring of health system performance and future research. The introduction presents a short review of the history of the SUS, describes the core principles that underpinned the reform, and offers a brief description of the evaluation framework used in the report. Chapter two presents findings on the extent to which the SUS reforms have transformed the health system, focusing on delivery, financing, and governance. Chapter three asks whether the reforms have resulted in improved outcomes with regard to access to services, financial protection, quality, health outcomes, and efficiency. The con

The success of political efforts to create a more open economy in Brazil over the past decade has depended crucially on support from the industrial sector, which long enjoyed the benefits of protection by the state from economic competition. Why businesses previously so sheltered would back neoliberal reform, and why opposition arose at times from sectors least threatened by free trade, are the puzzles this book seeks to answer. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with industrialists and business association representatives, as well as a wide range of other sources, Peter Kingstone argues that the key to understanding the behavior of industrialists lies in the impact of four factors on their preferences for reform: the effect of economic crisis on industrialists' perception of the viability of the earlier development model; the sectoral location of their firms in the economy and the advantages historically accruing therefrom; the adjustment options available to them given their position in the market; and the credibility of the government's promises about reform and its tactical choices for getting them implemented through the political system. The mix of these four factors, Kingstone shows, left business preferences relatively malleable and thus available for support of reform, even in the face of potentially high costs. Whether such support was forthcoming depended on industrialists' perceptions of the ability of government leaders to deliver on their promises. Widespread resistance to reform occurred when leaders lost their credibility. Under Fernando Collor's leadership, that credibility was never recovered; under Fernando Henrique Cardoso's, it was recovered through increasing concessions to industrialists on the character of the reform program.

In the 1990s Brazil launched a comprehensive economic liberalization program. It lifted its trade barriers, adopted new market-oriented regulations, opened up its capital market and abandoned earlier efforts to internalize production and to build vertically integrated systems across several sectors of the economy. In spite of the visible gap that separated the top global giants from the large local enterprises, Brazilian companies seemed to be willing to join in an economic liberalization process that was bound to expose them to unprecedented levels of competition, bring about a high degree of uncertainty and, in many cases, ultimately put their own businesses at risk. Big Business and Brazil’s Economic Reforms examines the most emblematic aspect of the Brazilian economic reforms, the support from parts of the local entrepreneurial class for the opening up of the economy. It investigates the reasons why Brazil carried out these economic reforms in the 1990s, the transition process and the impact of the opening up of the economy on some of its most important sectors, such as the aerospace, auto and auto parts, food processing, oil and petrochemicals, ethanol, steel, telecoms and telecom equipment industries. This book offers an in-depth analysis of Brazil’s distinctive development paths, from the Latin American economic thinking of the early stages of its industrialization to the neo-liberal stance of the present day. It sheds new light on one of the main challenges facing all the large developing economies in their move to become more integrated into the world economy, the fostering of large enterprises, and is a great resource for students and researchers interested in global business, development economics, and Latin American economic history.